Each decade holds an iconic
record of shared experience that illuminates and defines its ambient
Zeitgeist—the evolutionary art, trends, morals, and human expression that
ultimately give definition to movements, periods, and generational labels. In
2010, we crossed a milestone in history that reveals a decadal record of
new-millennium culture. What trends in art, technology, and human behavior have
ultimately defined the past decade of shared experience? Is there a natural
process or synergy that has connected contemporary art, technology, and human
behavior in new and profound ways?

Karen Eliot, BAMCorp

Miximalism is a popular-culture
exploration of the emergent patterns that gave rise to the pervasive change
found in every mean and mode of our daily lives. Television news has evolved
from simple talking heads into multichannel layers of data and animation that
appear more like a video game than a newscast. Music has changed from single
melodies into layered sampling, mashups, and remixes that sharpen the
thirteenth-century notions of canons and fugues.

We are experiencing an exciting
time of profound cultural change and dramatic realignment of core business
models, technology, and fashions of artistic expression that have influenced
and defined our world culture—and, more specifically, have transformed print,
music, media arts, film, and television in ways we couldn’t imagine only a
decade ago.

The world of publishing has
changed more profoundly in the past ten years than in the previous 500 plus
years since Johannes Gutenberg invented the printing press. Broadcast
television reached its apogee and is hurtling downward at increasing speed and
the music business is almost unrecognizable.

As chaotic as the change has
been for companies, technologists, and artists, we the audience are also faced
with profound change. The past ten years known as the new-millennial decade has
spawned an explosion of new devices, digital venues, and art forms that
frequently overwhelm our ability to consume them in any reasonable fashion. The
disruptive technologies, new art forms, and new forms of consumption that
empower artists and consumers have also created new challenges and questions
ranging from copyright to preservation to behavioral health.

The Assyrians believed that the
mythological phoenix arose anew from its own ashes as one entity is reborn into
another. As one culture is destroyed, so the new culture is born of the ashes
of the old. As challenging as the first millennial decade has been for
established cultural art forms, new exciting ideas have emerged and sliced the
cultural pie into smaller and smaller pieces. Television didn’t kill radio, and
computer games are not going to kill the movies (but piracy may if big media doesn't embrace flattened release windows and ubiquitous distribution). For creators and consumers
alike, a whole new world of expectation and engagement has taken hold and
firmly established itself as the preeminent form of the new-millennial cultural
experience.

There is a symbiotic, virtuous
cycle that has emerged. Technology is driving significant behavioral changes in
human multitasking and media engagement, as well as providing profound new
tools and distribution methods for digital artists. The digital arts have
driven profound developments in technology and yielded new forms of artistic
expression that are bending the curve of popular culture. Audiences have new
expectations for content engagement and have devoured new, innovative forms of
technology and the practical application of scientific research.

Never before in the history of
the world has the synergy of science, art, and behavioral change yielded such
profound shifts to business, culture, and the lives and practices of the common
person. What begin in earnest in the 1990s ultimately realized its disruptive
and inspired potential in the 2000s.

Karen Eliot BAMCorp

Cell phones, the Internet,
computer games, and multitasking behaviors began long before the year 2000.
Multichannel art forms, such as collage or montage or the multitrack notion of
a musical canon, date back generations. None of these things in and of itself
defines the new-millennial identity. It is the profound amalgamation of
devices, services, and content folded and baked into itself that gives us a
hint at the underlying ethos present.

Your cell phone is now the
digital equivalent of a Swiss army knife: It’s a music device, a camera, a GPS
navigation device, a book, and an email and Internet application, as well as a
phone. Your computer game system is now a movie player, Internet device,
telepresence communication device, exercise equipment, and shopping
application. The game content itself is no longer just a game—it’s now a movie,
a theme song, a web portal, a social network, and any number of aftermarket
branded items. Your car might well be hybrid; your PC is now a TV; your TV is
now a web browser; your honey-crunch yogurt is probiotic; and, by the way, what
happened to the newspaper?

As you bask on your
microfiber-blend, hide-a-bed sofa beside the soft jellyfish glow of your transgenic
Labradoodle it might occur to you that our couch-potato culture has been
replaced by “couch-commander culture,” whose Pavlovian conditioning demands an
ever-increasing, multichannel, ADHD lifestyle.

A quiet evening at home reveals
your subconscious ability to parse the chirps and burps of your smart
phone—unconsciously prioritizing the mobile-centric, text-message “bleeps” from
the email-notification “dings.” “Ding!” directs our attention away from surfing
the web, past the chat window, and into the email inbox. The laptop volume is
muted, so the television fills the background ambience, and, out of the corner
of our eye, the CNN text crawler “teaser” makes us grab for the DVR
remote—hopefully without dropping our spork or spilling our Japanese-fusion
Thai salad.

You know who you are.

Like the proverbial frog in a
slowly heated pot of water, we’ve been cooked without a clue—welcome to our
contemporary eclectic mashed and remixed culture delivered in a multichannel
casserole of deliciousness. Pick up your spork and dig in!

As enjoyable as it is to poke
fun at how the world has changed, it indeed has changed. We have changed; art
has changed; business has changed; and the inimitable artistic change found in
the new-millennial decade exists, as yet, without classification.

The purpose of this blog is to
identify what specifically happened in the first millennial decade that gives
it a unique characterization and identity and then to classify it as a defined
cultural period that I call miximalism.